Argent (Hundred Days Series Book 3) (30 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Newgate Prison, Old Bailey Street -- Evening, October 3rd, 1814

              Bit by rain falling outside the protection of the Newgate Prison’s high stone arch, Spencer stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ethan at the crest of a surging crowd. The shouts at their backs were deafening, men and women crying out in condemnation or simply making noises of contempt. Old and new sweat, stale booze, and tobacco wafted up in an invisible haze, adding to the general seediness.

              Waving fists behind him toppled his hat to the scaffold's base for a third time, and Spencer ducked to claim it. When he stood, Ethan was blandly sweeping cabbage from the sleeve of his navy greatcoat. “Like Prussian artillery,” he muttered beneath the roar, raising a brow meaningfully at Spencer. They had already been pelted countless times by produce and worse under the frenzied aim of a bloodthirsty mob.

“Why?” Spencer jammed an elbow behind him, knocking back a toothless loudmouth he had practically worn for the last quarter hour.

              “Why what?”

              “Why would you wear a Weston to the Newgate gallows?” Spencer narrowed his eyes. “Is this Major Burrell's doing?”

              “Major Burrell cuts a smart figure as far as the ladies are concerned. I don't know that I'd mock him so freely. Besides,” Ethan patted down his double row of silver buttons, “my wife likes me in this coat. A
great
deal, as it happens.”

              Spencer opened his mouth for a retort, but stopped as he caught a hush falling over the crowd.

              The Bailey's iron gate swung open. Two blue-uniformed constables filed out ahead of a gaunt, wild eyed minister who was bald in a patchy way that made Spencer wonder if the man had plucked his hair from nerves just before making his exit.

              He was right to look afraid. Spencer estimated a good wind would snap the man in half inside his dumpy black cassock, which was half what the crowd would do if a riot ensued. It was a real possibility tonight, judging by a thrum of hysteria that pulsed from over his shoulder.

              Despite a damp sting of a stormy October night, hundreds had turned out for the hanging. Three at once,
that
was something by itself, but a woman, too? No wag-tongue fishwife would miss such a rare spectacle. Yet, despite showing up for the event, a good many
were
missing it. The crowd stretched as far as the eye could see down both sides of Old Bailey, filling a wide cobblestone square at one corner, where it met with Newgate Prison. Wet stone walls boxed them in on every side of the square. Poor rowhouses across from the massive institution were used for coin and entertainment. Families hung from windows and clever landlords had let their roofs for a modest fee, but not every spectator who wanted a closer look was going to get it.

This had traditionally led to arguing, and more than a few colorful insults scented with beer. Onlookers took sides, even when they were strangers to the fighting parties. Someone threw a rock, another a fist, and then a brawl would spread like a barn fire all the way to Ludgate Hill.

              Spencer braced at the idea, eyeing a thin number of constables present to address such a riot, and raised his hat to the passing minister who managed a weak nod. Poor bastard.

              The two men shuffled out next, arms bound by thick ropes behind their backs. Adams was the tall, greasy-haired one, his horse face as marked by the pox as an 'R' branding his left and right cheeks. Two rapes in Spencer's estimation was two too many, and still there were more he claimed as victims. He had heard the accusations against Adams in the dock, waiting for Paulina to be brought out the first time. Faceless voices in the crowd around him now shouted names of other women. Two men waved kitchen knives calling eagerly for the man's bollocks. Spencer wished them success; Adams’ final victim had been a child.

              The second man Spencer knew nothing about, except that he was leering, portly, and in a few minutes he would be half an inch longer than he was now. That was all he cared to know.

              Beside him Ethan tensed and braced him with a shoulder. Now it was Paulina's turn. The crowd behind them positively crackled with tension.

              In different circumstances, he would have laughed when she stepped out into the street. Her ruff-necked brown satin dress was the height of fashion, and her matching cap pinned to a mound of gold curls that would have done for a ball.

              “Long live the queen!” someone shouted. It echoed through the crowd, followed by cheering and guffaws as she was marched along. She stabbed them all with haughty glances, pausing when she passed him. “How does it feel to hang a woman?” she hissed.

              “No less satisfying than if you were a man.” No pleasure or joy, nothing more than a settling of accounts. Paulina was here to pay as owed, and he would bear witness to see that it occurred. Together with Ethan they tipped their hats in unison. There was more to say on her twisted lips, but before she could open her mouth a guard prodded her, sputtering, on towards the steps.

              The gallows were really a coffin without the sides, he thought. Stout wooden beams formed supports and a frame at its top. The structure extended in a long triangle from the wall of Newgate gaol, twelve feet up, and its paneled scaffolding could be brought out or put away at notice. Ropes and mechanisms formed its guts, an empty belly inside waiting to devour convicts above. At its base were six stairs, all that stood between Paulina Paton and a fate better than she deserved.

              “Goddammit all,” muttered Ethan jamming him with an elbow, pointing to the street at the platform's far end.

              Chas Paton, pale and utterly lit, judging by bleary eyes and slack limbs, hung back between two shouting, scrubby-haired women. Spencer was about to tell Ethan that if Chas wanted the satisfaction of seeing Paulina's end, he deserved it. Then he caught what Ethan had been trying to point out: Chas's hand stuffed deep inside his coat front.

              Ethan rushed out first, being the one with any sort of credentials, as a crown agent. Spencer certainly did not envy him that tonight. Ethan's top hat raised and lowered at the lunge of each constable, obliging him to bark, “Whitehall, Whitehall,” over the seething crowd so that the guards let them pass in order to reach Chas.

              Chas spotted them too late. He turned to run, but Ethan's long legs swept his feet from under him and Spencer took a firm grasp on Chas’s coat. A few offended spectators shoved Chas as he fell into them, and Spencer used that momentum, hurling him face first into the prison's rough stone wall.

              His boots scuffed wet grit atop the pavement. He growled, grunted, and then stilled, panting beneath a point of Spencer's elbow in his back.

              “What is in your coat, Paton?” demanded Spencer.

              “Go to hell!”

              Ethan clucked his tongue, leaning left then right around Chas, shoving an arm between his torso and the wall.

              Ethan held hands aloft to display his prizes, and Spencer let Chas go with a whistle. “I can fathom a man carrying one, but what reason could you possibly have for a pair of dogs, Paton?”

              Chas snatched at the pistols, but Ethan raised them higher, stepping back and slipping them inside his own coat. From behind them the minister's warbling voice raised above the crowd, reaching the middle of the Lord's Prayer. Chas covered his face and sobbed. “I can make this up to Alix. Paulina is my doing. A man has an obligation to make things right.”

              “A man does not present himself at the Old Bailey with a brace of pistols as though it's a Newcastle mining camp.” This from Ethan, who crossed his arms, bearing all the emotion of marble.

              “And the second pistol, Chas. What was the purpose?” asked Spencer, though he already knew.

              “I failed!” He leaned in, beating fists against his chest. Spencer winced as Chas's rum and garlic breath fanned his face. “I couldn't protect the business, or my sister,” he cried. “Not even myself!”

              Now he was crying in earnest, a braying miserable sound waving in and out in time with his drunken swaying. Ethan tipped him a nod, and Spencer hung his arm around Chas's neck. “You will thank me for this, eventually.”

              He held Chas fast in the vice of his elbow, pressing at two throbbing points on his neck until eyes rolled back and he fell limp to the gutter. Leaning down, he rested fingers at Chas's throat and, feeling the steady beat, nodded. Together they hefted him up against a wall, out of the foot traffic. “There. We’ve spared him further embarrassment.” He leaned back, sizing up Chas’s unconscious heap. “Or, at least the awareness of it.”

              Spencer glanced behind them. “And we’ve spared him the memory of what’s to come.”

              The hangman had draped all three of his prizes with their ropes. Adams and the other convict were anonymous twins now, heads buried inside fraying and dirty linen hoods. The hangman had stopped before Paulina, the minister taking the same position behind her. There was an exchange between the three, Paulina's lips repeating the same desperate phrase, eyes wide and searching the crowd beyond her executioner. Spencer could not hear her voice over the din, but he could read her lips plainly:
I was obedient.

              And there it was, three words to form the root of all the evil she had committed. There was no penitence or contrition, but blind obedience to her father. It had spurred her on and salved her conscience all at once, until now when it found her abandoned.

Producing a hood for his last victim, the thick fingered executioner struggled with Paulina's hair, trying to pull it down, then reaching for her cap. That unleashed a sharp tirade at the indignity, Paulina bobbing and ducking until Spencer was certain she'd put herself through the floor early.

              The minister fished out his own handkerchief, which ignited a new struggle as the two men attempted to cinch it around her head. Paulina's entire face flushed while she hurled profanity at their efforts. Finally, the hangman untied the sweaty, dirt streaked kerchief from around his tree-trunk neck. The bickering began in earnest, Paulina struggling to pull her face away from the hangman in front and the minister's entreaties behind, all at once. The last of her dignity shredded, and Spencer felt some divine retribution in the moment.

              Behind them, the crowd rose in pitch and seethed, unhappy with the delay. If they didn’t get this settled and proceed, more than the three up on the platform would need to be buried.

              Ethan shifted foot to foot, watching Paulina’s struggle, grim-faced. “Thank the lord we spared him.”

              Spencer nodded his silent agreement, feeling more sympathy for Chas than he’d thought possible.

              Perhaps faced with inevitability, Paulina stopped struggling so that the stained rag could be tied over her face. The minister stepped back and raised his hands across the three, his small voice reaching just to the crowd’s edge. “May God have mercy on thy souls.”

              Absolute silence fell over all assembled, and it was still enough that Spencer thought he caught a ship's bell out on the Thames.

              The hangman grunted out his count:
One, two, three.

             
Thump
. The trap door slamming open was an offhand remark; a dull, short sound making plain that it had done the same a thousand times without scruple.

              Both men’s necks snapped, and both went limp. Paulina, being lighter, was not so lucky. Her shoulders rowed and her feet pumped staccato, a drowning woman struggling for air that wouldn’t come. Spencer’s stomach clenched; after all that Paulina done, he wanted justice but not suffering. He refused to close his eyes; he would see it through. After what felt like an eternity, Paulina spasmed and finally stilled and twisted limp in her noose.

              He had watched until it was finished and marked the moment when Paulina had paid her debt. He lowered his head, eyes closed, and exhaled.

              A roar swelled over him, the crowd undulating forward as one giant body, pressing them toward the scaffold. Men and women rushed the steps ahead of laggard sentries, and surgeon’s assistants eager for their next autopsy, next experiment. They could claim bodies ahead of the family, ahead of the mob, and that caused trouble.

              Spencer knew what would happen now; he'd seen plenty of the same violence in France. The crowd expected more than the show they’d received so far. The atrocities that would follow were grotesque: shorn hair and even limbs passed around as amusements, souvenirs. It reduced the living to not much better than the executed, in his opinion.

              Spencer drew his pistol, Ethan following suit with Chas's pair. One he aimed overhead, and they each trained a muzzle on the crowd while the constable's men cried for order.

              A few daring hands slapped at his barrel, and cries of 'traitor' rose up here and there. He was disgusted by the outburst, and his pistol was aimed for self-preservation. He had no interest being crushed by hoodlums in their rush to defile a dead murderess.